We buried Cecily Ashe in the glasshouse garden, under a pear tree she had loved, in the shade of the ripening fruit. Tomas chose the place. He said it was the oldest living thing in Ashgrove that had never belonged to the Oak, and that a woman who had spent four hundred years in the dark ought to have fruit over her. He said it in his ordinary voice, the way you say a thing you’ve carried so long it’s become part of the furniture. Then he began to dig, and wouldn’t let anyone take the spade. When it was done, the four of us stood in the thin autumn sunlight and nobody said anything clever. Pip put a handful of pears at the foot of the grave. Elliot read three lines of something in a low voice, from memory, and I didn’t catch what. I stood with my mother’s scarf in my hands, folded carefully off the old woman’s knees, still faintly warm from a cat, and I thought: so that’s what a name is for. Someone had hung a small lantern from a low branch. As we turned to go, a flame the size of a thumbnail crept up out of the bottom of the glass, looked round cautiously, and settled in the wick again. Then another, in the lantern on the glasshouse door. The wicks were coming back. Slowly. One at a time. The way you come back into a room after a loud noise. When we came out into the square, it was full of people. They were the guests. I’d forgotten about them. There were perhaps thirty, standing in the cold bright morning in their crumpled ball clothes, with the dazed hollow look of people who have woken in the wrong bed. Some had suitcases. Some had nothing. The woman in her fifties who’d chosen the Hush stood at the very edge of the crowd, holding her own elbows, her face grey. The man in the tweed jacket who’d taken Memory sat on the kerb with his head in his hands. They had all chosen, I realised. Last night, in the great hall, before the lanterns went out. They’d walked up to that long dark table with the candles shining and Calla Rue smiling at them, and each had laid a hand on an envelope and said yes. And the Hollow, for all its shaking, had kept its law. Nothing is taken that isn’t given. The gifts had been freely accepted. They were real, and they were done. My stomach went cold. “They don’t know,” I said quietly. “They haven’t the faintest idea what they’ve done.” “No,” said Elliot, beside me. “Nobody does. That’s rather the point of it.” “I have to tell them.” “You can. You should.” He caught my arm, gently. “But look at their faces, Mira. They’ve just been given the thing they wanted most in the world. Anything you say sounds like a woman standing between them and their prize.” He was right. The man in the tweed jacket had lifted his head and was staring across the square with a look of pure helpless wonder. He’d lost his wife three years ago, Pip had told me. He would be hearing her voice at this very moment, clear as a bell. I couldn’t take that from him. It wasn’t mine to take. So I did the only other thing I could. I went into the bookbinder’s, whose door stood open and whose huge gentle owner stood blank and motionless behind his counter with a bone folder in his hand. I found paper and a pen. I sat at the long workbench and began to write. It took the rest of the morning. Thirty letters, one for every guest who’d chosen, each addressed by name and sealed with a blob of the bookbinder’s wax, which I was a little ashamed to find I rather enjoyed. I wrote them nearly all the same. I didn’t explain what the gifts were. I didn’t say what I’d seen. I only wrote: Dear ___, You’re going to be happy for a while. I hope you are. If there ever comes a time when you’re not, when the gift weighs more than you expected, or the thing you wanted turns out to have been something else, then come back. The Season opens on the twenty-fifth of October. The door will be open. You won’t be asked why. You’ll only be asked what you’d like returned, and whether you’re ready to carry it. I’ll be here. Mira Kessler, Keeper of the Hollow I stared at that last line a long time before I signed it. The red bus didn’t leave until noon. I think it was waiting for me. I think the driver knew exactly how long it would take me to write thirty letters, and sat in his seat with a newspaper from some other year and never once looked at his watch. I gave the letters out as the guests climbed aboard. Some took theirs without a glance. Some looked at me with the bright distant slightly pitying smile of the newly gifted and tucked it in a pocket. The man in the tweed jacket held his a moment longer than the rest. His eyes were wet. “I heard her,” he said abruptly. “This morning, on waking. My Margaret. She said, ‘Put the kettle on, Dougie.’ She said it a hundred times in forty years. But this was exactly how.” His voice shook. “I don’t care what it costs, miss. I don’t. You’ll understand that one day.” I said I did. It was a lie and a kindness, and I think he knew it was both. The woman who’d taken the Hush didn’t look at me at all. She took her letter without a word and went up the steps with her head high and her face shut like a fist. I watched her go with an ache I couldn’t name. Somewhere there’s a family who will never argue with her again. I wanted to run after her. I didn’t. I’d made a promise, to a boy on a fountain, in the dark. Jonah came last. He had a small battered rucksack over one shoulder and the look he’d had on the first evening on the bus, raw and open and young. He wasn’t calm any more. His hands were trembling. His eyes darted over the square, the lanterns, the stone bird, like a man seeing the world for the first time. “I can’t see anything,” he said. “It’s only flickers. This morning I knew the baker would drop a tray, and she did. This afternoon I don’t even know if it’s going to rain.” He laughed unsteadily. “It’s awful. It’s wonderful. I think I’m going to be sick.” “Jonah.” “I’m going home. I’ll see my dad. I’ll be there for Thursday, whatever Thursday turns out to be.” His voice cracked. “And when it’s over, when I’m ready, I’ll come back. October. I’ll find the card or the road. And I’ll ask. Properly.” “You don’t have to.” “I know.” He hugged me, hard and quick, all elbows. “That’s why I want to.” He went up the steps two at a time. At the top he turned, grinning through his tears, and held up one hand, palm out, like people do on station platforms. Then Winifred. She came across the cobbles tapping her stick, in a good plain dark green wool coat she must have found in one of the empty houses, which suited her far better than what she’d arrived in. She stopped and looked me up and down with her small sharp clouded eyes. “You look dreadful,” she said. “Thank you.” “You’re welcome. It’s the first thing I’ve said to anyone in thirty-nine years without being told it was lovely.” She was smiling, wickedly, helplessly. “Do you know what I shall do when we reach the station? I shall find a telephone box and ring Ruth. I shan’t say anything wise. I shall just say, ‘Ruth, it’s your mother.’ And after a very long silence she will say, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. What now?’” Her voice broke on the last word. She put the back of her hand to her mouth and laughed and wept. “She’ll be annoyed with me. Do you understand? I have never in my life been so happy.” I put my arms round her. She smelled of lavender and tea and wool, and she was so slight I was afraid of holding too hard. “Write to me.” “I shall write you the most infuriating letters. You’ll want to throw them on the fire.” She stood back and looked at me, and her eyes were suddenly serious. “Mira. There are two kinds of weight. The kind that bends you, and the kind that holds you up. It’s a fine line. Mind which is which.” “I will.” “You’ll think you will,” said Winifred, and kissed me on the cheek, and went up the steps. Pip was the hardest. She stood at the foot of the steps with her rucksack on, her hair every which way and her face blotchy from crying. She hadn’t said a word for ten minutes. She kept looking at me, then at the bus, then at me, like someone deciding whether to jump off a cliff. “I could stay,” she said at last. “I could help. I’m good at lists. Danny’d understand, he’s fourteen, he’s practically grown…” “Pip.” “…and anyway the council would sort him out, there’s a social worker, and…” “Pip.” She stopped. Her face crumpled. “He’s fourteen,” I said gently. “He’s got nobody else. You’re the only person in the world who makes his tea.” I took her hands. “That’s the most important thing anyone has ever been, and you’re already doing it. Go home. Make the tea. Be bossy. That’s the whole job.” “But you’ll be on your own.” “I won’t.” I looked over my shoulder at Elliot, leaning against the dry fountain with his hands in his pockets, trying to look as though he weren’t watching, and at Tomas on the kerb with Cecily’s iron keys in his lap. “I’ve got a rather good team. And I’ll have you.” “How?” “The post. It’s the one thing the Oak’s never been able to touch.” Pip stared. Then she gave a wet startled laugh and threw both arms round my neck and held on so hard I couldn’t breathe. “You,” she muttered into my collar, “are the bravest idiot I’ve ever met.” “I know. Go home.” She climbed the steps. At the top she turned, chin wobbling, and pulled something from her hair and tossed it down to me. A small plastic clip, battered and red. I caught it against my chest. “So you remember who you’re doing it for,” said Pip. The doors folded shut with a long soft sigh. I watched the red bus go up the long road into the trees till the last glint of its windows was swallowed by the pines. The square was quiet afterwards. A leaf blew across the cobbles. A long way off a church clock struck, though there was no church. Elliot came and stood beside me. He didn’t say anything. He only stood, and the silence between us was so easy that I was surprised again at how much I’d come to rely on it. It was in that silence, in the clean cold afternoon light, that I felt in my coat for the photograph. I don’t know why. I hadn’t looked at it since Ashgrove. But I needed, suddenly, to see her, so I drew it out and held it to the light. The seaside. The grey sky. My mother, thirty-eight years old, with her hair blowing across her face and her eyes tight shut, laughing so hard that her whole body folded round it. I looked at her laughing. I waited for the sound. It had always been there. I only had to look at that picture and her laugh would come up out of the paper like water from a spring, rich and low and cracked at the top, that lovely helpless bark that made strangers in shops smile without knowing why. It didn’t come. I stood there with the photograph shaking in my hands. I looked at the open mouth, the closed eyes, the line of her throat. I knew she was laughing. I could remember that she’d laughed, a thousand times, in a thousand rooms. But I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear my mother laugh. The world went quiet. There was a thin high singing in my ears, and Elliot’s hand on my shoulder, and the cobbles tilting under my feet. I hadn’t been hurt when the Oak took the kitchen. I hadn’t been hurt when I paid for Cecily. I’d only felt, distantly, a small cold space where something used to be. This wasn’t distant. This was losing a limb. “Mira.” “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t remember her laugh. It was the second one. It was this. It took her laugh.” Elliot said nothing. I saw him shut his eyes, and I knew, with a kind of dreadful sympathy, that he was listening. Not to me. To something inside himself, a voice, a sister’s last word, which he’d carry in perfect clarity to the end of his life. The two of us in the same square with opposite wounds. Then another voice spoke, quiet and shaking and a little hoarse. “I can tell you.” Tomas Vey had risen from the kerb. He stood with Cecily’s keys in one hand and the other pressed flat to his chest, his kind weathered face working. “I can tell you what it sounded like. I was there. I heard it a hundred times in the autumn of ’98. It was a bark, Mira. God help me. A great ridiculous cracked bark of a laugh, like a seal. She was always so embarrassed. She used to clap her hand over her mouth, and it would go on coming out through her fingers.” He drew a breath. “And it went up at the end. Always up. Like a question. As if she were laughing and asking you something at the same time. Isn’t this ridiculous? Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it the best thing you’ve ever heard?” I was crying openly. I didn’t care. “You can’t give it back,” I whispered. “It’s gone.” “No. I can’t give it back. But I can give it to you again. Told to you, in my own words, as often as you like, until you have it. Not as it was. As I remember it. Which isn’t nothing.” His voice caught. “It’s a poor copy. I know. But it’s a copy, Mira. It’s better than a space.” I looked at him. At the mended spectacles, the wrongly buttoned cardigan, the twenty-eight years of waiting. And I understood I hadn’t been given a gift by the Oak, not even a bitter one. I’d been given a team. “There’s a better way,” said Elliot slowly. He’d opened his eyes. His face had a strange look, tight and stubborn and almost alight. “I can’t forget anything. You know that. It’s been the curse of my life for eleven years. But you, Mira, will forget. A little, every time. It’s built into what you’ve chosen. And somebody should write it down.” “Write it down?” “A ledger. Everything you return. Every price you pay. Everything you lose. You tell me, and I’ll remember it perfectly, and I’ll set it in a book in my own hand, so that whatever the Oak takes, there’s a record. So nothing is ever wholly gone.” He breathed in. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever been able to think of that my gift is good for.” There was a long silence in the square. I looked at Elliot Marsh, who had come to this town eleven years ago for the sound of a dead girl’s voice and spent every day since being tormented by the clarity of it. And I saw, for the first time, that the thing which had been his punishment might be someone else’s mercy. “Yes,” I said. My voice shook. “Yes. Please.” He nodded. His eyes were shining. In the square of Ashgrove, with the autumn light going thin and gold and the stone bird silent on its dry fountain, three people who’d never meant to find one another stood together in the quiet. We didn’t notice at first that the square was no longer empty. It was Tomas who saw it. He made a small sound and put out a hand, and we turned. They were standing in a half-circle at the edge of the cobbles. The residents. Dozens of them now, more than I’d seen in the cellar, drawn up in silent ranks. Odalys. Fenwick. The clockmaker with her little lens flashing. The girl with the rabbit. Their faces were still smooth, their eyes still empty, their hands still hanging. But they weren’t looking at the ground, as they had been all week. They were looking at me. And as I stood there, the smooth face of Odalys the baker did something it hadn’t done in forty years. It moved. The brows drew together. The mouth trembled. A single clear tear slid down her cheek, and she lifted one floury hand towards me, as slowly as a woman reaching out of a dream. “Please,” said Odalys. It was a thin cracked far-off voice, like a voice heard through a wall. It wasn’t the bright kind cheery voice of the baker. It was someone else. Someone underneath. “Please. I’m so tired. I’d like to go home now.” I went to her. I took her floury hand in both of mine. “What’s your name? Your real name. The one from before.” A long shuddering breath. “Dorothy,” said the woman in the apron. “Dorothy Webb. I was seventeen.” “Dorothy Webb. Do you want back what you gave up?” The whole square held its breath. “Oh, yes,” said Dorothy Webb. “Yes. Please. Yes.” Behind me, I heard Elliot take out his pen. This story is hosted at NovelPing.
Chapter Thirteen: The Last Bus
The Night of Names